A few Celtics might have moved on and joined the Brooklyn Nets but if you go to Nets.com you will still be seeing green as the domain redirects you to the Boston Celtics website.

Contrary to some reports, this isn’t the work of a hacker. This is just the work of a couple unfunny domain squatters hoping for a nice payday from Nets owner Mikhail Prokhorov. Domain squatters register names of famous people, products, services or trendy sayings and hope some business will call them up asking what their asking price is.

As somebody that has registered and/or maintained over 100 domains, I can tell you that it’s really frustrating dealing with domain squatters that email you about domains they feel you would be interested in or they wait for your domain to expire so they can scoop it up in case you forget to renew them and then try to sell back the domain they registered for $10 for thousands of dollars and in some cases millions.

The owners of Nets.com are Jane Hill and Gordon Robinson of Cyber Mesa – a telecommunications company in Santa Fe with a really shitty looking website that looks like it was made back in 2000 when people were viewing websites with an 800 x 600 resolution. The domain was first registered way back in 1994 back in the Kenny Anderson to DC days but it wasn’t until last year that the company started having fun with the domain.

After years of redirecting to that shitty website, they changed it to a pic of Mav’s owner and non friend of Mikhail, Mark Cuban, sticking his tongue out with the message.

Looking for the New Jersey Nets? Looking for the Brooklyn Nets? They’re not here…but they SHOULD be! After all, there’s just one team: The Nets!

and a short message in Russian that translates to

“Michael, have you noticed? Vilena wondered…”

After they had fun with that pic and bringing up the scandal involving the Nets owner and a prostitute named Vilena, CybeMesa changed the redirect to a page to purchase Mavs tickets. The next redirect was to a Jay-Z fanclub site called Jayzonline.com thinking it would matter to the minority owner that owned less than 1% of the Nets.

Without much success or buzz from that move they moved the redirect to the New York Knicks All-Star Ballot page.

Now Cybermesa is back and they can celebrate as tons of media sites are talking about the redirect to the Celtics website but I can guarantee that they wont be getting a check from the Nets anytime soon and from te looks of their portfolio with a bunch of dead links, I can’t see anybody wanting to hire them for what they are supposedly good at.

FYI. If you ever wondered how much domains can sell for. Sex.com was sold to Clover Holdings Ltd for $13 million. Here’s a list of a few other expensive domain names.